The Mirror in Us - Sociological Analysis of Jordan Peele's "Us" (2019) Film

From Sociological Theory 2019

A Durkheimian and Du Boisian View of Ourselves and the United States (US): A Sociological Analysis of Us

we see a myriad of mirroring to our own real life experiences and struggles. Depending on our environments we can all appear and behave very differently.

Psych wards, like animals, how if whatever control we’re under can protect us, meet our needs. We’re all human and want more than basic survival.

HUMAN CONTRADICTIONS!

What do we see when we look in the mirror? What other side may we all have? What umbrella does American culture & politics have over our identities?

Introduction

Us is one of the most popular thriller movies of 2019 so far. After Jordan Peele’s first hit Get Out, which is a movie that leaves a clear message about racial tensions still afflicting African Americans in the United States today, Us is far from that simple, leaving ambiguity and numerous possible interpretations. The film touches on a myriad of issues currently facing America, and even causes us to question who our own selves are by the end of the film. The movie is about two very different groups of people, the ordinary above ground people, and the “tethers” who have been living in underground tunnels their entire lives. There is a possible third group of people depending on how one interprets the movie, and that could be African Americans, or the groups who have struggled living in America since it’s beginning. The above ground individuals are portrayed as normal Americans, while the below ground people, are portrayed as insane and lacking morals or values. From a sociological theory perspective, we will determine what these groups represent in American society and as ourselves and an explanation for their actions through Durkheim and Du Bois works. There will be several spoilers in this essay.

The purpose for Us is to ultimately evaluate various social aspects within the United States today, and to reflect upon ourselves and history. Emile Durkheim wrote about how society maintains order, social solidarity, and the types of suicide, which I will relate to the groups in the film and how they are portrayed. Du Bois wrote about double consciousness, stereotyping, and the veil, which I will be discussing when referring to the Wilson family, and America’s past. It is significant in analyzing Us in these ways to cause American citizens to analyze ourselves and acknowledge our wrongful past in hopes that these conclusions could be another step toward treating everyone equally, and to prevent making the same mistakes as our grandparents and great grandparents.

Plot Summary

Us follows an upper-middle class family of four, the Wilsons, who go on a vacation to the beach. It must be noted that they are an African American family, which is important in my analysis. Their family friends, the Tyler family, are another significant group for the purpose of the analysis. When the parents, Adelaide and Gabe, and their two children, Zora and Jason, go to the beach, it brings back deep psychological trauma and anxiety of Adelaide’s past and she begins to feel an overwhelming fear that something bad is going to happen. Her fear becomes true when her family is forcefully intruded upon in their vacation home by four strangers that are identical to them. However, these doppelganger strangers behave polar oppositely from them, wearing red jumpsuits and holding scissors, their goal is to terrorize their look-a-likes before eliminating them and filling their positions. It is found out that the government was conducting a huge experiment below ground in tunnels that held clones of everyone living in America. Although the family survives the attacks, the ending shockingly reveals that the reason for Adelaide’s reluctance to going back to the beach was because she was actually the original clone, who replaced the real Adelaide when they were children. The true Adelaide was angry and trapped for years in the tunnels, until she organized the “Hands Across America” plan to escape and kill their originals who have been enjoying their lives above ground.

Are We American or Are We Black?

The first group to analyze will be the four Wilsons themselves. Double consciousness, stereotypes, and the veil are all setbacks the family faces, although subtle, as African Americans living in the United States as Du Bois describes in The Souls of Black Folk. It is apparent from the beginning of the film that they do their best to come off as your average family living in the US where they encounter double consciousness frequently. Coined by Du Bois, double consciousness means the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” (Du Bois 405). Double consciousness is a way for minority groups (the Wilsons) to prevent being stereotyped by majority groups (the Tyler family and the rest of the white Americans). On the way to their vacation home, the song “I Got 5 On It” by an African American artist, a song commonly known as pertaining to drugs, plays on the radio when the son questions the song’s meaning. The daughter immediately answers it’s about drugs, but Gabe, the father, quickly shuts down her statement to avoid exposing his son to the realities of the world (Anon 2019). This relates to the threat where the father doesn’t want his son to learn certain information in an attempt to keep him from becoming a stereotype. On top of that, when Gabe tries to defend his family from the strangers with a baseball bat before they enter the home, his voice unconsciously grows deeper to imitate a stereotypical, dangerous black man with a weapon to deter the intruders away (Anon 2019). The family also displays the practice of carefully thinking of how they’re perceived where the parents think about themselves from their own point of view, and society’s point of view. From the family’s clothes to the car to vacationing, they do everything they can to fit in as your everyday upper-middle class family, despite the underlying racial problems they’re often reminded of. A few smaller details of double consciousness is Gabe’s shirt with Howard written across the front, likely standing for Howard University, a prestigious predominantly black population school (Anon 2019). When groups are stereotyped, it can lead to a feeling of nondifferentiation or deindividualization, which can lead to problems in itself and will be discussed with Durkheim’s theories.

The veil is a similar theme present throughout the film with the Wilsons, where it is hard to distinguish themselves as both black and American in a racially constructed society. Du Bois basically describes the veil as an obstruction which “yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” when referring to African Americans (Du Bois 405). Their close family friends are an all-white family of four, the Tylers, who clearly try to outcompete them with the higher income and toys they possess. They have a nice, large boat, home voice assistants, cosmetic surgeries, and the fancier, more expensive vacation home. Even though the Wilsons try to reach the same level as the Tylers, it is much harder for marginalized groups, such as African Americans, to obtain that degree of wealth. The “tethers,” or the crazy clones can also be theorized to be the parent’s biggest fear of becoming the expectation or stereotype that society puts them under constantly as a black family, and their fight against the clones could be their constant struggle to resist the expectant attitude of Americans where they become the ordinary lower class black family living in America.

Discontent of Role in Society or Lack Thereof Through the Tethers

The second group to analyze will be the “tethers,” or the insane clones of the originals. This group has been locked away, tortured and repressed their whole lives, no doubt building up hatred for their more fortunate “twins” living happily above ground. A few themes they exhibit are failings at social solidarity, and collective consciousness from Durkheim’s theory in The Division of Labor in Society. Social solidarity is basically the interdependence one feels with others in a society from similarities in beliefs and values, and how much they feel they can help others. Collective consciousness is described as “the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinant system with a life of its own,” (Durkheim 225). These involuntary participants to a cruel government experiment are missing social solidarity and collective consciousness, and they crave these concepts to feel accepted, belonging, and useful. With the absence of a proper collective consciousness and no limits in place, they formed their own culture with their own morals, values, otherwise known as a collective conscious, which was pretty much nonexistent. They lacked a collective conscious since they’ve never been educated or taught differently, allowing them to commit crimes against the originals without regret or punishment, and live what was once the original’s life. Durkheim states, “we do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it,” meaning these clones didn’t have a social punishment system set up, so they have no morals to follow (Durkheim 226). The tethers can represent a number of mistreated and forgotten about groups in America, enslaved African Americans, the homeless, the mentally ill, and so on. These clones are a stereotyped and marginalized group who lack freedom, and all wear the red jumpsuits who feel frustrated, and will act out due to the lack of individuation or differentiation, like misunderstood, forgotten about, or minority groups. What they represent for certain, is a group of unhappy people, who feel disconnected, like they don’t belong to a society, or like they can’t be themselves. All citizens across the United States had an underground clone, which could represent everyone’s unhappiness with the current state of America, and that we all have a dark side just waiting to come out at the right time unless conditions and social hang-ups improve.

Adelaide’s character is quite unique, as we come to learn at the very end that she was the clone the entire time, fooling most of us, as she recalls the specific memory from her childhood of switching lives with the real Adelaide that she’s been withholding for years. Her character represents Americans who attempt to hide or ignore the truth, but the truth will always be present, the truth being crimes and injustice against other people through wars, genocides, slavery, homelessness, and more. Through nurture, collective identity, and social solidarity, she became an average member of society, although marginalized as a black woman. This shows that minority groups, or the forgotten and abandoned have the ability to live normal lives like Adelaide, regardless of their background.

We Can’t Stand Ourselves

One of the goals of the film is evidently to push us to examine ourselves and our mistakes as a country, personally and societally. The clones despise the originals and will do anything to put an end to their existence. This touches on Durkheim’s definition of anomie in Suicide. Since the tethers and originals, or the free individuals, are identical, their desire to harm or eliminate the above ground people is a reflection of their hatred on themselves, wherein they are essentially murdering themselves. This is because of the feeling of anomie, where they don’t fit in or never did belong to society since they have been trapped in a valueless, cultureless, and meaningless world underground. Durkheim proposes “the state of crisis and anomie is constant and, so to speak, normal,” which might explain why Americans have normalized a corrupt society that ultimately doesn’t work (Durkheim 262).

Egoistic and Anomic Suicide Through the Tethers

There are two main reasons for why the clones display such hatred for the originals, other than the obvious. They themselves never had any social ties and a sense of moral confusion and lack of social direction. They feel there was never any meaning or hope to life, and can we blame them? Through this knowledge and Durkheim’s explanations of both egoistic and anomic suicide from Suicide, we can gather the behavior they are exhibiting against who is really themselves, is a form of egoistic and anomic suicide.

Durkheim defines egoistic suicide as “deficient in truly collective activity, thus depriving the latter of object and meaning,” relating to the clones feeling of never formed social norms, feeling an absence of life meaning (Durkheim 264). Since Adelaide was the only tether who learned how to speak a language, while all the others yelled or grunted, there was a huge lack of communication, and the socialized norms were never created by them. This made them even more frustrated to escape and attack the closest thing to themselves, the originals. Durkheim defines anomic suicide as “society’s influence is lacking in the basically individual passions, thus leaving them without a check-rein,” meaning an absence of guidance and moral order (Durkheim 264). If there is no spoken language, education, or civilized figures to pass down morals, beliefs, values, and regulations, then there will likely never be a moralistic system put into place. This fact made them hate themselves even more since their childhood, causing them to become even more eager to find their doppelganger and symbolically murder themselves as they found little value to the meaning of life.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the film, Us, has several possible interpretations. A few of the ones I touch on is the idea of America being built upon tons of bloodshed, violence, and discrimination, and Adelaide and her family are one of the representations of that. We explored this idea through Du Bois’ theory on African Americans in American society. Further, it is possible “Us presents the idea that the very foundation of America rests upon genocide and slavery,” from Funaro’s theory, especially since Adelaide and her family are black (Funaro par. 12). Second, the absence of collective consciousness and social solidarity are causes for the tethers to feel misplaced, neglected, and worthless to society, which in turn causes them to desire to lash out against society. Additionally, they have the potential to represent a variety of mistreated groups, African Americans and their enslaved history which still affects them today, the ever-growing problem of homelessness, the entrapment and abandonment mentally ill people feel, the horrific history of wars, genocides, and violence, and a plethora more of events and injustice that America stands on today. Finally, a wide array of issues that are still currently haunting and physically impacting the United States, although most people avoid addressing these problems, causes citizens to feel less satisfied and valid in our society. This brings about suicide and suicidal tendencies in our particular society due to our unique history. When people lose hope or feeling of no meaning, they don’t care to stay alive anymore.

Regardless of the film’s true meanings or if there even are any definite meanings at all, the film is undoubtedly successful at making the audience think critically of who they are individually, and what America really stands for. Through a few theories by Durkheim and Du Bois, several issues apparent in Us are highlighted and explained as being dilemmas America still surprisingly needs to solve. These observations mean that if there are still people unsatisfied with society and their role in it, we will never be as prosperous as our potential. In Hellerman’s interpretation of Peele’s work, he suggests “we shouldn't try to bury and sanitize these images,” but rather “we should be openly talking about them,” and he is right, the issues can’t be resolved unless we discuss it (Hellerman par. 17). These obstacles leave our country almost functionless. Us is an attempt to wake America up by standing as a reflection to ourselves and the US.

2533 Words

Citations:

1. Anon. 2019. 'US’ and The American Dream: What It Means – Wisecrack QuickTake. Wise Crack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDMgFplACaQ

2. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Calhoun et. al. Classical Sociological Theory. Wiley-Blackwell.

3. Durkheim, Emile. Suicide. 1897. Calhoun et. al. Classical Sociological Theory. Wiley-Blackwell.

4. Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society. 1893. Calhoun et. al. Classical Sociological Theory. Wiley-Blackwell.

5. Funaro, Eli. 2019. “Horror of the Red, White and Blue – “Us” A Film Analysis.” Outright Geekery. http://www.outrightgeekery.com/2019/03/24/us-film-analysis/

6. Hellerman, Jason. 2019. “The Meaning of ‘Us’: A Deep-Dive into Jordan Peele’s Nightmare. No Film School. https://nofilmschool.com/the-meaning-of-us-jordan-peele-nightmare